On the way there, I rolled out Hayne Boulevard, past streets with names that speak of a local culture from the near-distant past: Pompano, Mullet, Trout, Flounder.

And then Mayo Street. Perfect. All that's missing is French Bread Boulevard.

This stretch of eastern New Orleans, hard up against Lake Pontchartrain and stretched between the Lakefront Airport and Bayou Sauvage, is not doing so bad. The levees held here. The neighborhoods survived, for the most part. There are three snowball stands in operation on Hayne alone and if that's not a sign of life and recovery, then I don't know what is.

Although, next to one of them, there's a house with plywood over the door and big black spray-painted words still there: NEED HELP NOW.

But that was then. This is now.

The Office is where folks from around these parts -- the corner of Hayne Boulevard and Paris Road; technically Little Woods -- gather to talk about the events of the day. It's a way-way-out-there sort of place, a kind of end-of-the-world pocket of town, not really near anything except water and wetlands.

The outside of the Office is plastered with big plastic political signs, Boasso, Bruno, Bonin, etc.; the inside has a big American flag on one wall and an even bigger Jaegermeister flag on the other.

The Office is not my office. It's the Office, a local watering hole presided over by Red Dingeman, the thick, patriarchal proprietor of this juke joint, and why is that anyone you ever meet named "Red" over age 50 has a cigar hanging out of his mouth?

When I get to the Office on a crushing hot midafternoon, the clientele is sparse. Red sits on a barstool and as I walk in, a man is finishing a story: ".¤.¤. so I got finally my Road Home last week. Not as much as it should have been, but I got it. I look at it and I swear, I think they make up the numbers."

The speaker is Bobby Cure, of Bobby Cure and the Summertime Blues, a blue collar roadhouse cover band that's been working these parts for the past three decades. He and Red and Red's son, Anthony, are talking about what just about everybody around here talks about just about every day and that is: The Whole Damn Thing.

All of it.

Otherwise, on this particular afternoon, the Office is quiet (the Friday night karaoke is when the place really jumps, I'm told). Two young female bartenders shoot the bull. Miss Helen, the octogenarian who lives in the apartment above the Office, walks in holding her Entergy bill, so she's entitled to her gripes, too, but she shrugs it off and gives everyone a "How you doin', baby?" kind of welcome.

Miss Helen owns the building. She's been out in Little Woods since the days when Huey P. Long used to roam the waterfront cathouses and speakeasies here -- looking for easy peace and votes with equal vigor -- and a young man named Louis Armstrong used to blow his horn in a three-story tavern built on stilts over the water called The Ruby.

This place, it's got history.

"Welcome to Little Woods," Bobby Cure says to me. He wraps up the story he was telling his friends. It is this: On this scalding July afternoon, he went to a mortgage office in Chalmette and paid off the final note -- $250 -- on his Little Woods camp.

It's a camp, yes, but it's also been his full-time residence for decades; he raised two daughters here. Until. Until Katrina took it down. Nevertheless, for nearly three years, he has had to pay the note for a building whose pieces have likely floated to Cuba by now.

So it's paid off in full and he owns it outright but, what, really, does he own? Sixty feet of overgrown grass. And rows and rows of pilings that stick out of the water.

Not much to celebrate, really.

He lost his recording studio, his sheet music, his instruments and the rest of his life and so he moved to Kenner and says he'll rebuild some day but who doesn't say that?

Only one camp still survives on the miles-long stretch from the airport to Little Woods. Hurricane Georges took out half of them in 1998 and Katrina took out the rest. Red Dingeman's other son, Eddie, lost his place during Georges but rebuilt higher than the levee and it's the only house left today.

Of course, it got looted -- they climbed up a tree to get in! -- so no one lives there presently.

Such is life on the water. Louisiana life. An American life.

Bobby and Anthony invite me for a drive along the top of the levee, past where the paved road ends but where the remnants of camps stretch on for another mile. Anthony points to crooked pilings sticking out of the water and ticks off, one by one: "That was my nephew's house (pause) ... this was my dad's house (pause) ... etc."

Everybody lives in other places now. Red lives in a FEMA trailer, just around the corner from the Office, where we wind up on barstools, in the cool, dark comfort of a home away from home for the dispersed members of Little Woods.

This is where they come back to find each other, greet each other, pick up the local news and catch up on each other's families.

It is a simple, unpretentious watering hole, not unlike scores of similar local oases across the region. A gathering place. Town hall. One of the last reminders that this historic intersection -- Hayne Boulevard and Paris Road -- that this place, like so many others, has historical and family ties that pre-date us all and continue forward, small pieces of the big Katrina puzzle that everyone around here is still trying to put back together.

One day at a time, one house at a time, one family at a time. All of it taken down, monitored and hashed over at the Office, the kind of place where a stranger can walk in off the street and say: "Hey bartender, how 'bout a cold Bud? And if you've got the time, tell me a story about this place."

Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com, or (504)826-3309, or (504) 352-2535.